


Fahrenheit 98.6

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Magic, Post-Episode: s10e21 Dark Dynasty, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 04:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4005607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie wakes up cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fahrenheit 98.6

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [viviansface](http://archiveofourown.org/users/viviansface/pseuds/viviansface) for the beta/sympathy-raging. <3

Charlie’s last thought before she sinks down into darkness is: _The bathwater’s gone cold._

 

\----

 

There is no bathwater. But it is cold. 

There’s an ache like a shard of ice in her gut, and she thinks maybe she left the oven on downstairs. Or anyway, there’s something important she has to do. She can feel it floating just beyond the reach of memory, and when she puts her hand out to touch it (she can’t move her hand) it pops on her fingertips like a soap bubble.

There’s no bathwater. She’s on the ground floor and motel rooms don’t have ovens.

Her clothes are wet.

It’s cold.

 

\----

 

There are gardens in the middle of Emerald City. They hold crystal fountains filled with darting fish who flash like coins in the sun. Flowers the intense yellow of egg yolks, orange like the last burn of a sunset, deep velvety red. Hanging trees whose boughs trail in the water. Cool green shadows in which to sleep away the afternoon.

Dorothy tells her this as they stand beside a brackish stream outside the city limits, mud slurping at their boots. The water’s brown, the sodden corpse of a sparrow (who might or might not have been an ally) bobbing against the bank a little way downstream. This doesn’t look like the place for world-saving magic. Peter Jackson wouldn’t shoot a movie here. (Well, maybe the early stuff—but Charlie’s always been an epic fantasy kind of girl. Horror’s a one-night stand; not the kind of story you want to settle down with.)

But the spell says running water and this is the best they’ve got. They can’t afford to be picky.

Charlie shifts nervously from foot to foot. Tugs the hair at the nape of her neck, hacked short with a hunting knife after her first flying monkey attack left her with bloody patches on her scalp and a bitch of a headache. She still isn’t used to the weightlessness. It feels like she’s untethered from herself, like her head might just float off her shoulders and up into the atmosphere.

Dorothy catches her wrist, pulls her hand back down to her side and squeezes it once before she lets go.

There’s blood on both their hands. Blood and dirt and probably other, ickier stuff, too. Dorothy’s right eye is swollen shut. She hasn’t admitted out loud that she can’t see out of it too well anymore, but her aim is off. There’s a wound in her thigh that’s still bleeding sluggishly, because they haven’t gotten to stand still long enough for healing, and an angry red cut down her cheek that’s definitely going to scar.

(“It’ll be a cool scar,” Charlie told her as she cleaned it up this morning. “Nobody’s gonna mess with you.” Dorothy kind of smiled and kind of looked off into the green distance, and said, “I don’t mind,” and sounded like she meant it.)

One day, Charlie thinks. One day they’ll be still long enough to stop thinking about the next fight. They’ll breathe easy and sleep in real beds. A real bed, maybe. Then she’ll trace all of Dorothy’s scars with her fingertips, finally run hands over the lean muscles of her thighs and the ridges of her hipbones, kiss the hollow of her throat. Have it all be about something more than fitting broken pieces back together.

“It’s time,” says the Wizard, then, and Charlie pushes _when this is all over_ to the back of her mind and makes herself concentrate. Makes her future shrink to the next moment, to the point of the ornate dagger he holds to her outstretched palm.

She’s expecting blood. But when her self splits down the middle and darkness rips out of her like a tornado, what spills from her veins is light.

 

\----

 

_Charlie._

The voice comes to her muddied, distorted just beyond recognition. 

Reminds her of how things sounded in that creepy cave where they hid out before the final push toward Emerald City. Charlie swears that the passages through the rock moved and doubled back on themselves—though Dorothy kept one hand on the wall and swore she knew the way—taking them round in circles and finally separating them. She couldn’t be sure if the voice ringing in her ears was Dorothy’s or just her own echoing back to her off the rocks.

Or when she was little at the swimming pool and she’d swim as far as she could underwater, turn somersaults and pretend she was an astronaut floating in zero-grav. When Mom’s voice finally made its way to her ears and she surfaced, Mom’s face was white and strained with anxiety. She looked like she’d been calling for hours.

_Charlie._

It’s still cold as a White Walker’s tit, but it’s only now she thinks about water that Charlie realises she can’t breathe. She can’t _breathe_. But there’s light above her head, and she flails blindly toward it.

 _Charlie_ , she hears again, and then, “Charlie!” right up close in her ear. 

She gasps for air so hard it hurts, like splinters down the back of her throat. There are hands gripping her under her arms, hauling her up and holding her out of the water.

Strong hands, rough with callouses. Warrior’s hands.

Charlie blinks the water from her eyes. “Dorothy?”

“No, it’s the sugar plum fairy.” Dorothy’s face swims into view. Her right eye is cloudy, but the left sparkles with something bright and uncontained. “Yes, of course it’s me. But look, you’re still rebuilding. You need your strength. Get some more rest.” She cups Charlie’s cheek in her palm. It’s so warm. “I’ll be right here.”

 _Rebuilding what?_ Charlie wants to say, but she only gets as far as a slurred mumble before her eyelids refuse to stay open and she’s sinking again.

 

\----

 

This time, it’s Rowena’s voice that surfaces in her mind while she drifts. In the distillery, before she ran. Before the bathwater got cold. 

_I read the signs nature shows me. The forces that ruled before there was math._

She remembers wanting to protest that. There was no _before math_ ; math is just how humans write it down when we start to see the building blocks of the world around us. Spells are just equations; we’re all sum totals of molecules and energy. Math and magic, separate estates, her ass.

That’s when Charlie thinks to count her heartbeats in the silence.

She strains her ears listening for them, but hears nothing.

 

\----

 

She comes awake slower the next time. Breaks the surface of the pool and breathes in steadily, testing the air. Dorothy leans over the side toward her, her hair falling over her shoulder in a shining braid. The cut on her cheek is healed, the scar a thin zipped-up line, and her right eye is clouded.

But she sees Charlie. She sees her and smiles that roll-the-credits smile, like she did the morning after they took Emerald City. Exhausted, not without sorrow—but triumphant. 

She reaches out for Charlie and her fingertips trail in the water like the boughs of the willow trees. The flowers of the garden blaze like summer.

Sam and Dean told her all about Heaven. It’s a Greatest Hits thing. You live out your best memories over and over, which is either pretty sweet or kind of a rough deal depending on your memories, she guesses. This isn’t a memory. She’s only been to the garden in the center of Emerald City once, right after the battle, and it didn’t look like this then. The plants were all dead growth, the ground littered with rubble, the water filmed over with ash. 

In her memories, Dorothy doesn’t have a blind eye or a scar on her face.

Charlie lifts her arm out of the water and touches Dorothy’s hand, her cheek. Feels the ridge of scar tissue beneath her fingertips and finally lets herself breathe out and ask, “What happened?”

Dorothy tilts her head. “You tell me.”

The motel bathroom. One-armed Styne dude in the doorway. The contemptuous curl of his voice around the word _girl. Girrrrrl. Show me what you got there,_ lazily suggestive. She’d felt cheated that this asshat was going to be the one to take her out, but he’d taken one look at the knife in her hand and it had gleamed back at her from his eyes.

And—Sam. She had to tell Sam something. She tries to remember what it was, but she can’t get hold of it and it spirals away into darkness.

Dorothy’s hand grasps her bare shoulder. It’s so warm that she starts.

“I died,” she says, looking up. “I _died_.”

“Yeah, in that world. Not here.”

Charlie blinks up at her in incomprehension.

“You remember the spell? Before we took Emerald City?”

Mud. Mud and blood and light. She grimaces. “How could I forget?”

“It wasn’t just blood you spilled into the stream. You left a piece of your soul here too.” Dorothy makes it sound so matter-of-fact. Like a math problem. “You gave a part of yourself to Oz, and Oz protects its own.”

“ _Oz_ brought me back?”

“It rebuilt you out of itself.”

Charlie lifts her hand, holds it before her eyes. If she stares at it too hard, she imagines that she can see a fishscale iridescence to the skin, that her veins are green curling vines. She shivers.

“Come on,” Dorothy says, not seeming to notice. “Let’s get you out of there.”

She takes Charlie’s arm and pulls her close—closer than either of them would have dared, before, when they had a war to fight and no time to get distracted. Charlie’s thought about it a hundred times since, hiding out in damp motel rooms in the small hours with no company except her own thoughts and her own fingers. Her pulse ought to be racing.

She stops short, disentangles her hand from Dorothy’s and presses it flat-palmed to her chest.

She has no heartbeat. She has no heartbeat and she’s cold. She’s so cold.

 

\----

 

Dorothy takes her hand back, pulls her up out of the water, and she goes unresisting. 

Dorothy combs the tangles from her hair with her fingers, and Charlie only imagines for a moment that it’s not her own hair but waterweed, slimy tendrils ready to wrap around her like a facehugger. Dorothy rubs the pins and needles from her hands—and if the bones of them feel like the hollow bones of a bird, too light to be real, well, that’s just her mind playing tricks on her. Dorothy talks to her, makes her keep answering, and the animal noises and rustling leaves that echo in her own voice are nothing, nothing, just the sounds of the garden in the early morning.

She keeps telling herself that, but it doesn’t make her feel any realer. She still can’t feel her heartbeat.

“Hey,” Dorothy says, and she realises she must have gotten stuck staring off into space for too long, trying to identify the rushing of a stream or the clicks of an insect in the sound of her breathing.

She blinks and makes herself meet Dorothy’s eyes. “What’s up?”

“You look worried.” Dorothy touches her cheek. “Where’d you go?”

Charlie frowns. _How much of this is me and how much of it is Oz?_ she wants to ask, and, _Do you think this is how Frankenstein’s monster felt when he woke up?_

She doesn’t, just gives Dorothy the most honest smile she can and says, “I dunno, I just feel kinda… blue-pilled, I guess?”

Dorothy scrunches up her forehead. “Blue-what now?”

“It’s from a movie.” Charlie shakes her head. “Uh, it means—like this isn’t real. Like there’s still something else happening out there I have to fix, but I can’t remember what it is.”

Sam. She needed to tell Sam something. She thinks. She can’t remember what.

“Well,” Dorothy says, and runs her thumb along Charlie’s cheekbone. “Maybe I can convince you.” There’s a quiet spark in her good eye as she leans in, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth that’s more tentative than anything else Charlie’s seen on her. Almost nervous. She hesitates just for a second, then presses her mouth to Charlie’s.

She’s been thinking about kissing Dorothy for so long. The softness of her mouth, the curve of her arms around Charlie’s waist. There shouldn’t be room for anything else in her mind right now. She ought to be doing the Victory Dance inside her head.

It’s just that, when she closes her eyes, that feeling of something floating where she can’t reach it comes back.

“Red. Look at me,” Dorothy says against her mouth, and she opens them again. Her face is very serious, now, her voice warm and urgent. “I just got you back. Stay with me.”

It might be the sappiest thing Dorothy’s ever said, and if that doesn’t deserve Charlie’s full attention… well, maybe nothing does.

“Okay,” she says. She looks into Dorothy’s eyes, presses their mouths back together, and lets Dorothy’s warmth seep in through her skin.

She keeps her eyes open.

 

\----

 

But when she wakes again in the early afternoon, the sun moving high across the sky, the cold has crept back across her skin. 

She’s been sitting up for ages when Dorothy blinks her eyes open, her gaze fixed on the pool she rose from. It’s still in the green light that filters through the trees, reflecting the garden back at her crystalline and perfect.

“I can’t go back,” she says, to Dorothy’s questioning look. “Can I?”

Dorothy’s silence is all the answer she needs.

 

\----

 

Their room in Emerald City is so high up that every time she looks out the window, Charlie half-expects to see an X-Wing scream past under her feet. The city glitters around them in the sun, and at night it’s a galaxy of green stars far below her. The idea makes her feel weightless, like she might just step off the windowsill and find herself swimming above the city lights. She spends hours staring out at it, tracing its patterns with her eyes.

Oz protects its own. It remade her from the sliver of her soul she gave to save it. 

Charlie still doesn’t feel _right_ here, though. There’s a gravity that pulls her back toward her own world. The world that killed her.

If she could just remember, she thinks—maybe then she could let go. Live the life that Dorothy keeps telling her they have here.

“We have our own story,” Dorothy tells her when she tries to explain, pressing a kiss to the back of her shoulder as they stand at the window. “Right here. We can do whatever we want, go wherever we want. Why are you so desperate to jump back into somebody else’s?”

“They need my help,” is all the reply Charlie has. “They need me.”

Dorothy doesn’t have brothers or sisters. From what little she says, she spent her childhood wondering why her dad was never around, why she had to break rules and act out just to get a couple minutes of his attention. Charlie’s not sure she really gets being needed—not like this, anyway.

But she takes Charlie’s waist in her hands and turns her back from the window, brushes the hair out of her face and says, “What about what you need?” and Charlie doesn’t have an answer to that.

 

\----

 

She visits the garden some days, early in the morning. She sneaks out while Dorothy’s still sleeping, dangles her feet over the edge of the pool and gazes into the water like it might give her some clue how she got here. How she gets back.

All she sees is her own face reflected back at her. Most days, she can even look at it without wondering how much of it is really her.

Except that one morning, a water skater darts over the reflection of her face, and for a moment the surface ripples and Charlie imagines that it’s not her looking back out of the pool.

Red hair. Basement tan. But a smirk that says, _There’s a secret in the back of my mouth and I’ll use it to hurt you_ , and catlike flicks of eyeliner, and, _The signs that nature shows me—_

Charlie starts back from the pool like she’s been stung. It takes her a couple minutes’ deep breathing and visualizing fictional characters giving her judgmental looks before she can steel herself to look back.

It’s just her face. Just her own face and the water settling into stillness.

 

\----

 

Only after that, she finds herself looking harder. Counting. Finding patterns.

The ripples on the water. The symmetry of a water skater’s legs, of a leaf or a flower. The soft fractal of a fern.

Every lens in the compound eye of an insect that crawls across her leg as she sits still in the grass. Every glinting fleck of mica in the rocks at the water’s edge. Every cell in the pad of a water-lily. Every minute movement, every sound beneath the range of hearing, every vibration of every living thing. It’s like she’s reading the code that writes all of life.

Dorothy doesn’t say anything, but it’s obvious she’s getting worried about all the time Charlie spends staring into space. Once upon a time—before the war ended—she would’ve just said, “Stow it, we’ve got more important things to do,” and dragged Charlie’s ass back up and onto the road.

Of course, before the war ended, they didn’t share a bed; didn’t spend their nights pressed together under the sheets and their days not making eye contact. 

Before the war ended, Charlie always thought she’d go back home someday—or else they’d just keep adventuring, the yellow brick road never coming to an end. She wouldn’t be tethered to something inside her head she can’t get a hold of, to the memory of a world she can’t live in.

She’s pretty sure Dorothy doesn’t really know what to do without a war to fight. It’s a surprise to find that she doesn’t, either, anymore. 

But the feeling won’t let her go, and the way she sees things now—it’s new. Maybe it’s just Oz, she thinks. It rebuilt her from itself, and now she can see all of it right down to its tiniest particles, feel the energy that flows through everything.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was something that was there all along, and it took Rowena trolling her to wake her up to it. 

Math and magic. Charlie’s always been good at finding the patterns and decoding them. It’s just that she sees them in more places now.

When she breathes, she tastes every molecule in the air. It’s like light in her throat.

Light; not warmth. She can feel every vibration of the world around her, but when she presses her palm to her chest it’s still hollow as a cage without a bird.

She reaches out with her mind. Holding the patterns in her hands, feeling energy zip over the surface of her skin. If she can just see far enough, she thinks, maybe she’ll remember. Maybe her body will remember its heartbeat, its warmth.

 

\----

 

It’s almost night when she finally feels it. She’s sitting with her feet in the water, watching the sky darken and thinking that she probably should’ve headed back up into the city an hour ago and Dorothy’s gonna be worried and probably kick her ass. 

It’s just that she feels so close to something.

Ten more minutes, she tells herself. Ten more minutes, and then she’ll head back up. She lets herself look into water, past her reflection. The pool is where she came back—it has to be the source of something. Energy. Life. A fissure, or a boundary, or something. A place where worlds rub together.

She lets herself flow into the water, into every tiny current beneath the surface. Into gravity, down into darkness, into a place where darkness has no meaning anymore—

Oh.

Oh, Obi-Wan Kenobi on a cracker, there it is.

Something like a barrier. A permeable membrane. Maybe if she pushed hard enough against it, it would break above her head like water. And there’s a pulse of energy on the other side that she feels like the heartbeat she doesn’t feel any more, like _home_. 

It’s warm.

She doesn’t stop to think. To go back and tell Dorothy what she’s doing. She pushes out with her mind. Out and down and up all at once, seeking warmth and light as blindly as a flower.

Energy’s the same across universes. The same laws apply. There has to be a way.

She keeps pushing. Harder. It’s so close. She can feel it, life and light ready to spill into her hands, any moment. She’s almost there, almost home—

It breaks.

And she knows.

 

\----

 

_Sam._

He’s half asleep, and at first he thinks he’s still dreaming. He shakes his head to clear it.

Sam’s been avoiding dreams as much as he can, lately. They’re all variations on the same thing, really: Dean with blood on his knuckles and murder written on his face, looking at him like he doesn’t know him anymore, until Sam starts to wonder if maybe he isn’t himself after all. If maybe he turned into a monster while he wasn’t looking.

He doesn’t think he’s even tried to sleep since Dean took off. Which leads to this: dozing off in the distillery while Rowena pores over the codex (caressing it like it’s some precious baby kitten) and waking up to imaginary voices. Bad idea.

_Sam._

It’s not really a voice so much as a vibration, a faint buzz in the air that makes the hairs on his arms stand up.

Sam blinks, looks around. Across the table, Rowena’s watching him. She smirks like she knows something when he meets her eyes, but then she’s always doing that. He ignores her and looks for the source of the sound.

It isn’t the Book. Sam knows what it’s like to hear that calling to you. Painful, like a tiny drill bit burrowing its way into your skull. There’s something corrosive about it after a while. You start to wonder if its voice could trickle in through your ears and melt all of your insides.

This doesn’t sound like that. Sam’s gut says trust it, and however many times in his life he’s been wrong on that score, it still sounds like home.

He gets to his feet, scrubs at one of the smeared yellow window panels and peers out. There’s nobody there.

It’s only when he glances down and sees a light shining out of his pocket that he realizes it’s his cell phone. Rowena tuts and rolls her eyes as he pulls it out. 

The phone isn’t ringing—isn’t even vibrating—but the screen is lit up like Christmas, and looking back at him out of it is—

He blinks. Stares. “ _Charlie?_ ”

“In the flesh.” She pauses. “Well, actually not so much.”

“Are you—?” 

He hesitates, remembering that case in Iowa a couple months back. Andrew Silver, the ghost in the wireless. And Charlie was sending an email when she died. 

Suddenly, he feels like he might be about to puke.

“Oh, God. Oh, Charlie. I’m so—”

“What? Oh!” She waves a hand on the screen. It’s hard to see what’s behind her—just light, dappled as if she’s underwater. An impression of green. “Not a ghost. Kind of—maybe undead, trapped in Oz? Long story.” She frowns. “Or maybe short story, just weird. But anyway, the point is, I—I have to tell you something.”

Sam feels his eyes go wide. 

This could be a trick—could be Rowena screwing with his head, or Crowley trying to get him out of the way. But the look in Charlie’s eyes, nervous and elated both at once, the way she gets when she finally figures something out—is so real, so _her_. He wants to believe it.

“What is it?” he says. “Is it about the book?”

“Kind of. I just—when I was working on it, looking at the symbols? I didn’t know what they meant, but I saw a pattern, I guess. I didn’t figure it out at the time, but I think—it’s about balance.”

Sam frowns. “Rowena said something about that. About how all the ingredients of a spell have to be balanced—or redress a balance, something like that. I kind of thought she was just being pompous, but—”

Charlie nods. “I can see that. But it’s not what I’m talking about. The Mark of Cain—it’s not like, I don’t know, an alien parasite or something, where you get rid of it and the person inside is still the same. It’s about darkness. Or, I guess—absence. It takes things away. Getting rid of it isn’t enough. You have to—replace it with something positive. Give back what was lost.”

“You read that?” Sam asks. “In the spell?”

“Not exactly,” Charlie tells him. “I mean, I read it. I think. But not in the book. It’s written everywhere. Balance. I just started to see it. Sorry, it’s kind of hard to explain.”

Any other time, Sam would be desperate to know. But right now, there are more important things. The spell. Making sure Dean is still Dean when they cure him. “So,” he says. “ _What_ do we give back?” 

Charlie sighs. “I don’t know exactly. I wish I did.” Her expression goes a little distant, a frown creasing her forehead. “I just—what happened to me? I think it’s got something to do with that. I woke up here, and Dorothy told me I’d left a part of myself here, and Oz wouldn’t let me go, because I’d helped save it. I’d given it some of my soul, and it—it brought me back.”

Balance. A part of yourself.

Blood? Grace? Soul?

Figuring it out isn’t gonna be easy. Sam’s probably gonna have to do some things he doesn’t even want to think about.

But there’s an answer. That’s enough. He smiles at the screen.

“Charlie,” he says. “You’re a genius. Thank you.”

“You know it.” She grins back at him. It’s genuine, bright and wide, makes him want to reach through the screen and hug her. “Listen,” she says, then. “I don’t know if I’ll be back. But I love you bitches. All of you.” She pauses, and Sam sees her press her fingers to her chest, sees the wide surprise on her face when she does it. “You’re in my heart.”

He laughs, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Yeah,” he says. “We love you too.”

Charlie grimaces. “Man, I’m kind of glad Dean didn’t hear that. That was sappy even for me.”

Sam clutches the phone like a lifeline. “It kind of was.”

“I’m embarrassed.” But Charlie’s eyes are still shining. “I’ll call you,” she tells him, and then she fades into the light.

 

\----

 

It’s like déjà vu when she comes around in the garden again with Dorothy shaking her shoulder. 

At least she isn’t in the pond this time.

She isn’t in the water—and she isn’t cold. She takes Dorothy’s hand and clasps it between both of her own. Feels the rough patches and the callouses, the softness of Dorothy’s palms and the blood running warm beneath her skin. Every cell of it, every little spark of energy.

She just sits there for a moment, and then she grins up at Dorothy—and fuck, she’s beautiful, how did Charlie forget she was beautiful?—and reaches out to clasp her face in both hands.

Everything’s warm. She can feel the world singing in her veins, writing equations across her skin.

She closes her eyes, concentrates, and then there’s a surge of heat in her palms, and when she looks again Dorothy is staring at her out of two clear eyes, wonder on her face.

“You’re back,” she breathes, and a grin breaks like dawn across her face.

“You bet,” Charlie says, and doesn’t let go.

 

\----

 

“So, what now?” Charlie asks, later. They’re still in the garden, still touching.

Dorothy sits up, brushing bits of grass out of her hair. “What do you mean?”

“Well, like you said. We’ve got our own story right here. I’m not done with it yet.”

The smile that spreads over Dorothy’s face warms her like soup on a cold day; from the inside out. 

“I hear there’s a vacancy for a witch out West,” Dorothy says. “I say we get in there first, make sure she’s a good one.”

 

\----

 

It’s early when they set out. Most of the city’s still asleep, and there are goodbyes they should say, but Charlie’s kind of done with those for now. 

She can’t wait to get on the road. Her bones and her muscles itch with impatience, with the new power beneath her skin and all the new things she hasn’t seen yet. She practically dances her way out of the city; but when they reach the start of the road, she pauses to pull off her boots.

Dorothy’s giving her the you’re-a-crazy-person look—a new version of it, one that Charlie’s already decided she wants to see as often as possible. 

“I wanna feel everything,” she explains, and wiggles her toes on the warm bricks, the sunshine yellow of the road beneath her feet.

Dorothy shakes her head. But after a moment, she sits down beside Charlie at the side of the road, and starts to unlace her boots.


End file.
